I begin with a thought-experiment. Imagine, to start with, the disappearance of humans from the Earth. We are eliminated, in this scenario, not by means of a nuclear war or other pan-planetary catastrophe, but rather by a Homo sapiens-specific virus, which results in the swift deletion of our species but leaves our built environment intact, and the ecologies of which we are part undisturbed other than by our absence. Imagine, in fact, for the purposes of finessing the counter-factual, that the planet’s last human perished at some point in the late winter of 2012. What then would happen to ‘the world without us’, in Alan Weisman’s phrase (Weisman 2007: 5)? Or rather – for the more precise purposes of this thought-experiment – what would happen to the city of Cambridge without us? How would the city alter over the weeks, months, years, decades and centuries following its abandonment?

Allow me to hypothecate a set of futures for this post-human Cambridge. First and fastest come the hungry fungi, even at that cold time of year. In kitchens and dining rooms, moulds bloom on food left out on sideboards and worktops, spreading their mycelial nets of grey, yellow and green. With no one to chase it away, dust settles in the windless interiors of lounges and bedrooms. Decay has started, but so in its way has stasis. In March, a late spell of winter is cast. Water freezes in pipes, and then a thaw brings floods: ceilings crash down, walls fatten, soffit boards rupture. That summer, fire follows: lightning strikes and gas explosions, leaving cratered holes and husked houses. By August, rosebay willowherb – also known as bomb-weed, because it thrives on carbon-rich soil – flowers on these blackened sites like a pink floral fire.

Discussing Henry James’s ghost stories in December 1921, Virginia Woolf paused over James’s use of the adjective ‘unspeakable’ at the eerie climax of ‘The Turn of the Screw’: ‘The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly evening hour lost for the unspeakable minute all its voice.’ It was an unexpected adjective to encounter in the work of such a fastidiously garrulous writer, Woolf implied. But, she went on to suggest, unspeakability was in fact one of James’s most important subjects. In his ghost stories, as in his novels, James was compelled by those moments when ‘some unutterable obscenity has come to the surface’: by those incidents or instants when – in Woolf’s careful phrase – ‘the significant overflows our powers of expressing it’. Readers shudder on encountering these narrative voids or superfluxes, she argued enigmatically, because they afford us a glimpse into ‘the dark’ that is ‘perhaps, in ourselves’. William Golding (1911–93) and Henry James (1843–1916) could not, at the level of the sentence, be more different. James’s sentences are prolonged, filigreed, and devoted – with their delays and recursions – to the subtle revision of implication. His favoured tense is the conditional, his natural mood the subjunctive. His prose cherishes the verb, which most often serves as a loom-end, sending sense shuttling back along a sentence in order to begin another, minutely altered, traverse.